Name: The Truth About Burnout
ISBN: 9780787908744

Christina Maslach

Michael P. Leiter

Today's workforce is experiencing job burnout in epidemic proportions. Workers at all levels, both white- and blue-collar, feel stressed out, insecure, misunderstood, undervalued, and alienated at their workplace. This original and important book debunks the common myth that when workers suffer job burnout they are solely responsible for their fatigue, anger, and don't give a damn attitude. The book clearly shows where the accountability often belongs. . . .squarely on the shoulders of the organization.

How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It

The Truth About Burnout

Julien Sobczak

The true face of burnout in contrast to common misconceptions.

We hear the word burnout more and more. Too often. But even if the burnout has become commonplace in the workplace, it does not mean we understand it. I didn’t. I ignored I had probably experienced burnout in my career. I thought burnout was mainly an individual problem. I was clearly wrong.

Burnout results from a mismatch between who we are and what we do at work. The authors have identified six mismatches – feeling overloaded at work is logically present, just like a lack of control, reward, fairness, community, or conflicting values between us and our company. The “good” news is that we don’t need to satisfy all mismatches to present the three common manifestations of burnout – exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness.

This is not a recent book on the subject but burnout is not a recent problem. I find the book does a decent job to introduce burnout in context, from its origin to its recent proliferation. The authors clearly demonstrate burnout is not an individual problem, but a problem companies should address to their own advantage. Burnout is about the social environment and thus alerts us the productivity of the company is declining. Companies can use burnout to learn and grow better. For the employees. For the clients. And for themselves.

Any employee will benefit from this book, independently of his current state. You can use this book to understand burnout once the first manifestations has started, but I recommend you to read the book right now as a prevention before the downward spiral starts. This book will help you reconsider burnout under a new point of view, understand your partial role in the burnout equation, and avoid doubting about your skills whereas the problem is about the environment. I would like more people to read this book so that burnout could be discussed more openly in the workplace. After reading this book, I think nobody is immune to the mental exhaustion caused by burnout. Read this book or another one on the subject, but don’t ignore burnout.

Nathan Griffin

This book is 20 years old and still is pretty relevant since most of the problems with companies that grow are people-related rather than whatever unique challenges of the business sector they are in. It was very dry and kinda hard to push through though.

The Truth About Burnout How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It